Authors: Paul Metcalf
“Luxuriant, this wilderness; but, to its denizen, a friend left behind anywhere in the world seemed not alone absent to sight, but an absentee from existence.
“Though John Marr’s shipmates could not all have departed life, yet as subjects of meditation they were like phantoms of the dead. As the growing sense of his environment threw him more and more upon retrospective musings, these phantoms, next to those of his wife and child, became spiritual companions, losing something of their first indistinctness and putting on at last a dim semblance of mute life; and they were lit by that aureola circling over any object of the affections in the past for reunion with which an imaginative heart passionately yearns.”
Melville.
The dark oak rafters, forming the main roof gable of the house, are pitched low, so that there is only a narrow corridor, running east and west, of standing room, and this is flanked on either side by low-roofed shadows, filled with trunks, old furniture, magazines, and the like, things that Mother—though she survives in the nursing home downtown and knows she will never leave it—will not allow us to dispose of. Against the rock chimney is a makeshift desk—an old door, laid flat on crates—and running the length of this are the books—books that I have bought, found, begged throughout my life, ever since the morning when Carl and I were playing in a haunted house, and we broke into what appeared to be a secret closet, discovered a small decanter of medicated sherry, the remnants of a whalebone corset, and an old copy of T
YPEE
. We rescued the whalebone from the rotted cloth, drank the sherry, and spent the rest of the day devouring what the bookworms had left of T
YPEE
.
Reaching the desk, I sit before it for a moment, uncritical, with perception undiminished, searching a balance.
(Melville,
W
HITE
-J
ACKET
,
called to observe a flogging: “. . . balanced myself on my best centre.”
There are the titles, the feel of an old binding: M
ARDI
, for example, an early edition, in two volumes, dark brown, maroon, and black, the backing ribbed, and inside, the marbled end-papers, and the Preface:
“Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether, the fiction might not, possibly be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my previous experience.”
Then, G
RAY’S
A
NATOMY
, Goss, Twenty-fifth Edition; and a disreputable copy of T
HE
H
OOSIER
S
CHOOLMASTER
, by Edward Eggleston. A thin, modern English book, C
OSMOLOGY
, by H. Bondi; T
HE
S
EARCH
F
OR
A
TLANTIS
, by Edwin Bjorkman; and a copy of N
ATURAL
H
ISTORY
, March, 1952, including an article,
S
HRUNKEN
H
EADS
. A T
EXTBOOK
O
F
E
MBRYOLOGY
, by Jordon and Kindred; also, J
OURNAL
O
F
M
ORPHOLOGY
, Volume
XLX
, 1908, containing A S
TUDY
O
F
T
HE
C
AUSES
U
NDERLYING
T
HE
O
RIGIN
O
F
H
UMAN
M
ONSTERS
.
Glancing upward, at the eight-inch rafters casting regular shadows across each other and across the roof boards, down the length of the attic, I am reminded
of the forecastle of the
Julia
in
O
MOO
,
planted “right in the bows, or, as sailors say, in the very eyes of the ship . . .”
“All over, the ship was in a most dilapidated condition; but in the forecastle it looked like the hollow of an old tree going to decay. In every direction the wood was damp and discoloured, and here and there soft and porous. Moreover, it was hacked and hewed without mercy, the cook frequently helping himself to splinters for kindling-wood from the bitts and beams.”
and there was “that gloomy hole where we burrowed like rabbits,” in
R
EDBURN
.
. . as well as
The Gunner in
W
HITE
-J
ACKET
— “. . . among all the persons and things on board that puzzled me, and filled me most with strange emotions of doubt, misgivings, and mystery, was the gunner—a short, square, grim man, his hair and beard grizzled and singed, as if with gunpowder. His skin was of a flecky brown, like the stained barrel of a fowling-piece, and his hollow eyes burned in his head like blue-lights. He it was who had access to many of those mysterious vaults I have spoken of. Often he might be seen groping his way into them . . .”
and
“. . . he was, withal, a very cross, bitter, illnatured, inflammable little old man. So, too, were all the members of the gunner’s gang; including the two gunner’s mates, and all the quarter-gunners. Every one of them had the same dark brown complexion; all their faces looked like smoked hams. They were continually
grumbling and growling about the batteries; running in and out among the guns; driving the sailors away from them; and cursing and swearing as if all their consciences had been powder-singed and made callous by their calling. Indeed they were a most unpleasant set of men; especially Priming, the nasal-voiced gunner’s mate, with the harelip; and Cylinder, his stuttering coadjutor, with the clubbed foot.”
The wind rises, screaming faintly, intensely, against the north side, and the old house creaks.
“The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.”
and, in a letter, he (Melville)
“I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is covered with snow. I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail in the house, & I had better go on the roof and rig in the chimney.”
and again, at another season,
“In summer, too, Canute-like: sitting here, one is often reminded of the sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary coast, an unknown sail.”
Glancing again at the rafters, I think of my great-grandfather, who built this house with his own hands: Hammond Mills, a Yankee, born in New York City, who went upriver to Albany, and then west
to Ohio and Indiana—a serious, hard-working man, whose favorite saying, his philosophy, perhaps, was handed down carefully from generation to generation, with the old furniture:
“The Mind is to the Body as the Whole Man is to the Earth.”
(
and there is Melville,
M
ARDI
:
“We have had vast developments of parts of men: but none of manly wholes.”
Hammond Mills built this house, acquired the land, and farmed it. His first-born son, by the law of primogeniture, inherited and continued farming, passing on in turn to his first-born son: my father; and
Father married a Stonecipher, poor white, southerner. Her people came over from England as bond servants, landed somewhere on the coast, say Charleston, worked out their time and then worked gradually inland, keeping the mountains to the west until Boone had shown the way; then moving through the Gap, to the Ohio, down as far as
Injeanny,
where they settled in Brown and Crawford counties, started little hill farms, and hung on when many of the others continued west to Pike County, Missouri, and thence to California, as Pikers . . .
Greasy Creek, Gnaw Bone, and Shake Rag Hollow—the hills, ridges, knolls, and bluffs to the north of the river—this is where the Stoneciphers dug in—farming, hunting, brawling, making likker—and later, in the flatboat era, moving down the Ohio and the Wabash, “half alligator and half horse, with a tech of wildcat” . . . but always, back to the farm, the root.
The folklore, too, came with the Stoneciphers:
Cut fence rails in the light of the moon, butcher before the full moon if the meat is to fry hard. Soap is to be made in the light of the moon, and stirred one way by one person. A waning moon is good for shingling, because it pulls the shingles flat.
and
A girl should never marry until she can pick clothes out of boiling water with her fingers, and if she sits on a table she will never marry. If a person kills a toad, his cow will give bloody milk.
And there was other folklore, too. Mother, hard-working, proud of the little cleanliness and respectability she could muster for us, quick with the flat of her hand when Carl or I misused the language, nevertheless used one word for all occasions, a word as old as words, ancient Anglo-Saxon association of four letters:
shit.
I have seen her dressed in her one good dress, serving tea for the preacher and his wife, and the word would come out, hang there in the middle of the room, unadorned and unexplained: and Mother would continue pouring.
After Father died, Carl left school, and, for a while, worked as a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest; Mother was nearly frantic, he was gone for months and months, without sending word. Finally there was a postcard, undated and unsigned, but in his handwriting:
Drink gin after cutting oak;
bourbon follows pine.
This was all, for more than a year. He came home one day, “to get more winter clothes,” as he said. He had joined an archeological expedition, persuading some college men of his erudition in Indian lore: in a few days—after delivering a lecture to Mother and me on the origins of American civilization—he was off to Alaska and the Aleutians,
“to dig boneyards in the Rat Islands.”
Again, there was no word for months. Then there began to arrive, not cards or letters, but weird objects, drawings, fragments of stone and bone. A piece of steatite, apparently carved by Carl himself, in the shape of a killer whale; a section of human skull, occipital, huge, larger than Carl’s own; a carving of an Indian woman, seated, with a symmetrical opening in her abdomen in which appeared a face, with a pair of huge, fierce eyes.
He was back again after several months, with more wild objects—and stories, in which, as Melville said, “fact and fancy, halfway meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.”
There was the shrunken human head, from the headwaters of the Amazon, which he admitted to having won from a fellow archeologist in a poker game;
his story of a day’s work carrying human remains from the cave where they were discovered, across the rocky, treacherous terrain, in a rainstorm, racing against the tide, to the boat—the description, with gestures, of picking up a bag of bones, the feeling of holding it in his arms, of having to hurry, with great delicacy, over the wet rocks, cradling the empty, formless treasures; and
the obscure tale of cannibalism, told when Carl was drunk, part of which seemed to take place a thousand years ago and involve Indians, and part of which took place just recently and involved Carl—something to do with eating a human being, genitals and extremities first, then the internal organs, flesh of the trunk, the neck, and finally the head—but the eyes! (and here Carl’s eyes became wild) he couldn’t eat the eyes!—or he did eat them and couldn’t forget them, they haunted him, went straight to the brain, clinging to the lobes like barnacles to a ship’s hull . . . and the feeling of holding only the skull in his hand, the eyes gone . . .
Olson:
“Herman Melville was born in New York, August 1, 1819, and on the 12th of that month the E
SSEX
, a well-found whaler of 238 tons, sailed from Nantucket with George Pollard, Jr. as captain, Owen Chase and Matthew Joy mates, 6 of her complement of 20 men Negroes, bound for the Pacific Ocean, victualled and provided for two years and a half.
“A year and three months later, on November 20, 1820, just south of the equator in longitude 119 West, this ship on a calm day, with the sun at east, was struck head on twice by a bull whale, a spermaceti about 85 feet long, and with her bows stove in, filled and sank.